## Why this exists
Lexical in Payload is a React Server Component (RSC). Historically that
created three headaches:
1. You couldn’t render the editor directly from the client.
2. Features like blocks, tables, upload and link drawers require the
server to know the shape of nested sub‑fields at render time. If you
tried to render on demand, the server didn’t know those schemas.
3. The rich text field is designed to live inside a Form. For simple use
cases, setting up a full form just to manage editor state was
cumbersome.
## What’s new
We now ship a client component, `<RenderLexical />`, that renders a
Lexical editor **on demand** while still covering the full feature set.
On mount, it calls a server action to render the editor on the server
using the new `render-field` server action. That server render gives
Lexical everything it needs (including nested field schemas) and returns
a ready‑to‑hydrate editor.
## Example - Rendering in custom component within existing Form
```tsx
'use client'
import type { JSONFieldClientComponent } from 'payload'
import { buildEditorState, RenderLexical } from '@payloadcms/richtext-lexical/client'
import { lexicalFullyFeaturedSlug } from '../../slugs.js'
export const Component: JSONFieldClientComponent = (args) => {
return (
<div>
Fully-Featured Component:
<RenderLexical
field={{ name: 'json' }}
initialValue={buildEditorState({ text: 'defaultValue' })}
schemaPath={`collection.${lexicalFullyFeaturedSlug}.richText`}
/>
</div>
)
}
```
## Example - Rendering outside of Form, manually managing richText
values
```ts
'use client'
import type { DefaultTypedEditorState } from '@payloadcms/richtext-lexical'
import type { JSONFieldClientComponent } from 'payload'
import { buildEditorState, RenderLexical } from '@payloadcms/richtext-lexical/client'
import React, { useState } from 'react'
import { lexicalFullyFeaturedSlug } from '../../slugs.js'
export const Component: JSONFieldClientComponent = (args) => {
const [value, setValue] = useState<DefaultTypedEditorState | undefined>(() =>
buildEditorState({ text: 'state default' }),
)
const handleReset = React.useCallback(() => {
setValue(buildEditorState({ text: 'state default' }))
}, [])
return (
<div>
Default Component:
<RenderLexical
field={{ name: 'json' }}
initialValue={buildEditorState({ text: 'defaultValue' })}
schemaPath={`collection.${lexicalFullyFeaturedSlug}.richText`}
setValue={setValue as any}
value={value}
/>
<button onClick={handleReset} style={{ marginTop: 8 }} type="button">
Reset Editor State
</button>
</div>
)
}
```
## How it works (under the hood)
- On first render, `<RenderLexical />` calls the server function
`render-field` (wired into @payloadcms/next), passing a schemaPath.
- The server loads the exact field config and its client schema map for
that path, renders the Lexical editor server‑side (so nested features
like blocks/tables/relationships are fully known), and returns the
component tree.
- While waiting, the client shows a small shimmer skeleton.
- Inside Forms, RenderLexical plugs into the parent form via useField;
outside Forms, you can fully control the value by passing
value/setValue.
## Type Improvements
While implementing the `buildEditorState` helper function for our test
suite, I noticed some issues with our `TypedEditorState` type:
- nodes were no longer narrowed by their node.type types
- upon fixing this issue, the type was no longer compatible with the
generated types. To address this, I had to weaken the generated type a
bit.
In order to ensure the type will keep functioning as intended from now
on, this PR also adds some type tests
---
- To see the specific tasks where the Asana app for GitHub is being
used, see below:
- https://app.asana.com/0/0/1211110462564644
- bumps next.js from 15.3.2 to 15.4.4 in monorepo and templates. It's
important to run our tests against the latest Next.js version to
guarantee full compatibility.
- bumps playwright because of peer dependency conflict with next 15.4.4
- bumps react types because why not
https://nextjs.org/blog/next-15-4
As part of this upgrade, the functionality added by
https://github.com/payloadcms/payload/pull/11658 broke. This PR fixes it
by creating a wrapper around `React.isValidElemen`t that works for
Next.js 15.4.
---
- To see the specific tasks where the Asana app for GitHub is being
used, see below:
- https://app.asana.com/0/0/1210803039809808
**BREAKING CHANGE:**
This bumps the **minimum required Next.js** version from 15.0.0 to
15.2.3. This update is necessary due to a critical security
vulnerability found in earlier Next.js versions, which requires an
exception to our standard semantic versioning process.
Additionally, this bumps all templates to the latest Next.js and Payload
versions.
Imports https://github.com/payloadcms/payload-admin-bar into the Payload
monorepo. This package will now be regularly maintained directly
alongside all Payload packages and now includes its own test suite.
A few changes minor have been made between v1.0.7 and latest:
1. The package name has changed from `payload-admin-bar` to
`@payloadcms/admin-bar`.
```diff
- import { PayloadAdminBar } from 'payload-admin-bar'
+ import { PayloadAdminBar } from '@payloadcms/admin-bar'
```
2. The `collection` prop has been renamed to `collectionSlug`
3. The `authCollection` prop has been renamed to `authCollectionSlug`
Here's a screenshot of the admin bar in use within the Website Template:
<img width="1057" alt="Screenshot 2025-03-05 at 1 20 04 PM"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2597a8fd-da75-4b2f-8979-4fc8132999e8"
/>
---------
Co-authored-by: Kalon Robson <kalon.robson@outlook.com>
